Early last year was the first time I found out one of my books was on a torrent site. It knew it was just a matter of time, and I was kind of relieved. Pleased, even. Like many authors, I have Google Alerts on certain things, and some of those things are my books. Really, I expected this.

E-books and the ability to share or not to share them: that is the question every publisher and distributor is agonizing over. But no one seems to be answering it with anything short of clutching their petticoats and jumping up on the nearest chair.

Maybe I shouldn't be so cavalier as an author to regard people stealing my work like this; after all, I hope to exist off of royalties.

As an author who has always had indie publishers, I think there's a strange democratic process going on with all of this. The main thing is that readers want to read things they can't get their hands on for one reason or another. I think it's really that simple.

Before e-books and Kindle, publishers were starting to lose their minds about the state of books. Authors, too. The Internet and blogs had book sales in the toilet for a lot of people, and there was a lot of talk about how we could get people to read books again.

One side effect of the e-book revolution in general is that American public libraries now increasingly rely on the electronic versions of books to save money and space. They have less physical books as a result.

With these developments, there is less inclination to pirate – both models cost little to nothing for borrowers.

However, publishing relic HarperCollins doesn't see it that way.

Last Friday, HarperCollins announced that new titles licensed from library e-book vendors would be allowed to circulate only 26 times before the license expires. This is bad news for libraries already facing hard times in budget and cuts.

Harper did their very own math around what they think the wear and tear on a lent book ought to be, and they estimated that "If a lending period is two weeks, the 26 circulation limit is likely to equal roughly one year of use for a popular title. For a three-week lending period, that stretches to a year and a half."

Harper also cited a vague need to protect their authors. (Macmillan and Simon & Schuster still do not allow their e-books into libraries.)

Another author who has alerts on their own books is cNet's David Carnoy, who after seeing a spike in pirating of his book Knife Music wrote his own tales of the torrents, Kindle e-book piracy accelerates. He wrote,

The most popular e-book download on Pirate Bay is the Kindle Books Collection, which has something like 650 e-books in it (it's just less than 1GB), and is ahead of a 224-page PDF e-book called "Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking." At the time of this writing, 668 people were "seeding" the Kindle collection while 153 people were downloading it. A few month ago, the numbers of people downloading e-book collections like this at given moment were in the 50 to 60 range with fewer seeders.

There's no doubt that cost factors into pirating on this scale, but there's no doubt that convenience and accessibility plays a starring role. "Advanced Sex" is the most-pirated book right now: I'll be wiling to wager privacy is a factor that should also not be overlooked.

Meanwhile, it stands to reason that we begin to examine things like the New York Times' e-book bestseller list. Are publishers – such as HarperCollins – in danger? And how transparent are these lists?

Certainly not as transparent as checking desirability and demand on Pirate Bay.